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03 January 2012

DAWNS Opens First Grant Pool

DAWNS is committed to lowering the barriers associated with humanitarian journalism and story telling. With revenue collected through the sales of DAWNS Digest, we will issue grants to writers, bloggers, citizen-journalists, photographers, documentary film makers or any other manner of storyteller. Nominations are open until January 25. We will announce the recipients of our first grants on February 8.

About the Grants: Each grant will not exceed $500. Do you need a new lens for your camera? Do you need help covering the cost of a plane ticket? If you are a humanitarian storyteller and can demonstrate how $500 will help your project, you should consider applying. We realize that $500 will probably not cover the entire cost of your project, but we hope it can help. As DAWNS grows, we will begin to issue larger grants.

The Application:Go here to apply. In your application, explain what humanitarian goals you seek to accomplish through your project. Explain the stories you seek to tell and how this small grant can help you meet your storytelling goals. Please also describe how you will help spread the word about DAWNS Digest–our ability to issue future grants depends on attracting more paying subscribers. Your project description, name and affiliation (if any) will be made public. So please only apply if you are willing to go public with your project.

Selection process. On January 26, we will open up the nominations to our community who will be given the opportunity to vote on their favorites. We have two tiers of subscribers: paying subscribers and those still in their free month-trial. Paying subscribers get 3 votes; non-paying subscribers get 1 vote. If you not a subscriber but would like to vote you must sign up for a free trial of DAWNS Digest.

The voting will help inform our decision about what the community believes is a worthy project worth supporting, but we reserve the right to make the final decisions. Our goal is to support high quality storytelling about people, places or things that are not typically well represented. So, when voting, please keep in mind the project itself rather than your relationship with the individual or group.

Input from our community is important to us. After all, we are only able to issue these grants because we have a community of subscribers who have signed up for DAWNS Digest. If you have ideas and suggestions, feel free to contact us.